all things on earth."* And the individual's private will, we must bear in mind, is certainly and literally a part of the There is no other material of which his will communal will. can be made. If he rejects the communal will in part, he rejects it on the basis of what it is in him, not from any will of his own which has a different source. This is the ground of the duty of rebellion. This unique relation between the individual and the community which the state represents-it may be a nation or any other community-is what seems to me to dominate the whole problem. It is further determined when we add the consideration that the state is an organ of action in the external world. In this sphere, which is its special sphere as an organ exercising force, it may really be called absolute, that is, if power extending to life and death and complete disposal of property can be called absolute. This does not mean that it is the whole end of life,† nor that it is the only object of loyalty.‡ It means, as I understand it, that, being the special organ of arrangement in the external world corresponding to that particular community whose will is our own will when most highly organised, it has the distinctive function of dictating the final adjustment in matters of external action. This is the only sense in which I have called it absolute,§ and the ground is obvious and simple. It lies in the tendency of the world of action to bring into collision factors which, apart from action, might never conflict. However purely nonpolitical two associations may be, and however cosmopolitan, * A. E., Imaginations, etc., p. 107. + Hegel, in one place, calls the state an end-in-itself, when he is contrasting his view of it with the reduction of its purpose to the protection of property or the right of the stronger. He regards it as having in it some of the end of life, viz., the embodiment of liberty; of course, not the whole end. It is for him the basis of the further, more specialised, achievements (art, philosophy, and the like).-Rechtsphilosophie, Sect. 258. See below, pp. 40 and 41. $ Philosophy of the State, Ch. VIII, 3, and Introduction to 2nd edition. if they claim the same funds or the same building they must come before a power which can adjust the difference without appeal. And if such a power were not single in respect of them, obviously there could be no certainty of adjustment without a conflict between the two or more powers which might claim jurisdiction. Cases like that supposed are frequent, of course, with churches. Thus there are two connected points, which, I think, the critics confuse under the name of absolutism. One is the power of the state as sustainer of all adjustments in the world of external action, on the ground which has just been explained. The other is the unique relation to the individual of such a community as is at present exemplified by his nation-state, because it represents, as nothing else in the world does, that special system of rights and sentiments, the complement of his own being, which the general will of his group has formed a state to maintain. It is the result, I take it, of these two grounds of unity co-operating, that in times of stress the state, as the organ of the community, will suspend or subject to conditions any form. of intercourse between its members and persons or associations within or without its territory, and will require any service that it thinks fit from any of its members. It does, in Mr. Bradley's words, "with the moral approval of all what the explicit theory of scarcely one will morally justify." That it does not exercise such powers to anything like the same degree in ordinary times, and that it recognises the rights of conscience even in times of stress, flows from the fact that its primary end is the maintenance of rights; and it will override no right by force where an adjustment is possible compatibly with the good life of the whole. And of this possibility it is the sole judge. What it permits, it permits by reason of its end, and no theory can stand which will not justify in principle its habitual action in time of stress. * Ethical Studies, p. 166. It is unmeaning to call our analysis introspective.* When the term introspection is withdrawn from its natural application to the individual looking into his own mind, its meaning as a criticism is gone. The method here employed, which originated with Plato's Republic, was renewed in modern times precisely as a revolution against what is rightly called introspection, by substituting for it the valuation and analysis of objective achievement. The state is a creation of mind as actual and external as a poem or a work of plastic art, or the systems of commerce and industry, and its relations to what is within it and to what is outside it are equally external objects, objects observed by extrospection. 2. "The state," as I understand the words, is a phrase framed in the normal way, to express that one is dealing with the members of a class strictly according to the connotation of the class-name. If a plural noun is used, there can be no certainty whether we are speaking of characteristics which belong to the class-members as such or of circumstances which may occur in each of them for independent reasons. "The state," in a word, is a brief expression for "states qua states." I confess that I am a good deal surprised that nearly all recent critics have stumbled, as it seems to me, in this simple matter of interpretation.† Would they find the same difficulty in the title of a book on "the heart" or "the steam engine"? It would be urged, perhaps, that a heart does not imply other hearts, but that a state does imply other states; but if the thing implies other things its name implies the reference to them. *Mr. Cole, Proc. Arist. Soc., 1915, p. 311. + Hegel pointed out this ambiguity, Ph. des Rechts, Sect. 258; cf. also A. C. Bradley, International Crisis, p. 47. With the phrase, "philosophy of men," which is offered as a counter-example (Mr. Cole, ib., p. 311), we may compare the two expressions, "knowledge of man" and "knowledge of men." The former means something like philosophy; the latter means the knowledge of individual peculiarities and defects, gathered by the experience of a worldling. The former belongs to Plato or Shakespeare, the latter to Major Pendennis. And, indeed, the whole raison d'étre of our theory is to show why, and in what sense, there must be states wherever there are groups of human beings, and to explain for what reasons men are distinguished into separate adjacent political bodies instead of forming a single system over the whole earth's surface. Our theory has told us, for example, that states represent differentiations of the single human spirit (Hegel), whose extent and intensity determine and are determined by territorial limits. They are members, we are told by Plato and Hegel, of an ethical family of nations, so far, at least, as the European world is concerned; they are characterised-it is Mazzini's well known doctrine-by individual missions* or functions which furnish for every state its distinctive contribution to human life. They have a similar task to achieve, each within its territory allotted by history, so Green argues, and the more perfectly each of them attains its proper object of giving free scope to the capacities of all persons living on a certain range of territory, the easier it is for others to do so. Obviously, they are co-operating units. This is throughout the essence of the theory. Now it is not, I think, unfair to point out that my critics, dealing unguardedly with "states" and not with "the state" or with states qua states," have on the whole founded their account of states not upon what they are, so far as states, but just upon what, qua states, they are not; upon defects which appear unequally in the several communities, consisting in those evils which the organisation of the state exists in order to remove, and does progressively remove in so far as true selfgovernment is attained. Such evils are war, exploitation within or without, class privilege, arbitrary authority, discontent directing ambitions to foreign conquest and to jealousy The term I have myself selected to describe the ethical unity of a nation-state. Phil. of State, p. 321. + Green, Principles of Political Obligation, p. 170. C of other states, the doctrine that one state's gain is ipso facto another's loss. 3. Space and time do not permit me to discuss, what I should be interested in discussing at some length, the continuous relations which extend beyond the frontiers of individual states, their importance compared with that of other continuities which are co-extensive with the area of the states and constituent of them, and why it is necessary to recognise, in spite of the former, separate sovereign political units which undoubtedly, while imperfect, tend to break down at the frontier, in a regrettable way, the continuities which pass beyond it.* Broadly speaking, the reason lies, I take it, in the exceptionally intense unity and concreteness of certain group-minds, in which innumerable continuities coincide, while other continuities, which extend beyond the group, nevertheless do not coincide with any marked rival unity. 4. It follows from our theory, as we saw, that the normal relation of states is co-operative. Their influence on each other's structure and culture is mainly a question of wants and materials. The characteristic dealing with them depends after all upon the national mind, as we see in the contrast of Athens and Sparta, the two leading states of one and the same civilisation. It is a curious fallacy in the disparagement of the state that the recognition of a debt to foreign culture has been pushed so far as to suggest that nothing great * This problem is suggested by the opening sentences of Curtius' History of Greece, with reference to the unity of continental Greece and Ionia, or by the natural unity of the basin of the North Sea (in the Hanseatic League). The case of England and Scotland, compared with that of England and Ireland, repays study. See above, p. 30. I do not say "national" minds, because I observe that the phrase is used with various unduly restricted meanings, cp. Lord Acton, who considers nationality a mere physical kinship. Plato shows the right line, surely. The group must have the same myth, ¿.e., the same consciousness of unity. It does not matter how they got it. Hobbes, it must be remembered, with kindred theorists, is far removed from the philosophy of which we are speaking. |